Friday, January 25, 2008

The creativity of the free mind - Levant on a blogger legal defence fund

Ezra Levant floats what I think is a brilliant idea: a legal defense fund to protect bloggers if they face defamation law suits or the Canadian "human rights" tribunals. As he notes, any such system of mutual aid would require bloggers to live up to some code of conduct or system of mutual observation, in order to protect against the bankruptcy of a mutual insurance system by what is known in the insurance industry as "moral hazard".

But Levant reminds me that much of the strength of classically liberal North American culture was built up in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by people organizing themselves in a myriad of fraternal/sororal and mutual insurance organizations, the architectural remnants of which (buildings now often converted to immigrant churches, here in Vancouver) you can spot in most North American cities. Buried in academic libraries you can find historical reference works listing the many thousands of these institutions. The value of such institutions, which were in large part destroyed by the Depression, World War II, large corporations, and the rise of the welfare and mommy state, is that when people self-organize to meet all variety of mutual insurance needs they also create all variety of social networks that can serve many needs. When scholars abstractly talk about the loss of "social capital" in the postmodern age, it is the loss of mutual insurance covenants, of people working to guarantee each other's freedom, that they are really talking about.

4 comments:

Something possessed me to post about the Gideon Bible Society a few months back. I don't know why it would have appealed to me, but there it is. I wrote about a buddy and me struggling to get by one evening and finally making some money to buy food, at which point we saw a man kill himself in front of us as we ate. The point of my reminiscence was that those who are alone need others anyway, especially if they're alone, and that a Gideons Bible is perhaps one thing that will connect a lost man to the rest of us in a dire time. Someone is determined to rid hotel rooms of such Bibles. But it's more than that: Gideon Societies are whole identities, legal things with people at the heart of them, masses of like-minded individuals working for a common good. Gideon bible Societies are also, perhaps essentially, insurance groups. It's not a simple thing. It's not a Richard Dawkins reduction to absurdity that many simple-minded hippies would have us believe is "all religion."

Mithraism was a burial society for Roman soldiers. If one can trust ones comrade even after death one is in good hands in life. Romans were better organized that we today. They had a fine grasp of reality and the idea that life is something that one lives till it's over, lived with others in a state of co-operation and competition.

We have iPods. I like the whole idea of "mutual insurance." The sense of it is likely lost on a flat screen tv world. One sees the result of that kind of solitariness: flat people, as it were.

By chance, I was walking down the street recently and found a Gideon Bible on the sidewalk. I kept it. I might be one of the last to have one:http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/search?q=gideons+bible

If we put up some advertising on this blog and started selling shares in this blog - at first for mere pennies - so that you could make a cheap investment in the future of this blog and thus have an interest in bringing more readers here and building up the comments section with healthy debate - would that be of interest to you? I'm trying to imagine a future where thousands of blogs can be capitalized as part of the high tech democracy you speak of. Or, when you speak of the National Post, is it that you still want much more of a shared national centre of attention, a single place attracting many thousands of readers, as a central clearing house?